In her installations and performances, Aki Sasamoto uses visual metaphor and absurdist humor to explore life’s biggest questions and most mundane activities, which often converge in the everyday objects she uses. In previous performances, the artist tested her psychological breaking point on a trampoline; worked through hygiene neurosis with the help of a modified washer and dryer; and conveyed her romantic relationships as a line of empty beer bottles falling into a trashcan one by one after a happy hour gone wrong.

Sasamoto’s installation and performance, Squirrel Ways (2022), which premieres in the United States at Arts and Letters, has the semblance of a living room. It is constructed from modular shutters, doors, and mulberry-papered sliding screens. Colorful personal objects are faintly visible through the screens, whose indeterminate design falls somewhere between door, room divider, and wall. A clothesline hangs overhead with a day’s laundry.

In a series of improvised performances, Sasamoto follows the questions this fluid environment raises. At what point does outside become inside? At what time in the cycle does dirty laundry become clean? At what depth does the surface of the ocean begin? The ambiguity of transition, or the “thickness of the border,” as Sasamoto puts it, is something the artist considers with deadpan humor as she transforms the work’s movable barriers into drawing surfaces and peepholes, or discovers the fishing lures, rulers, and sponges squirreled away within its paper compartments.

Sasamoto will perform Squirrel Ways on select Saturday evenings at sunset in March, April, and May.

Performance Dates
Saturday, March 18, 7:06pm (sunset) - reserve tickets

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aki-sasamoto-squirrel-ways-tickets-551784942617

Saturday, April 8, 7:28pm (sunset) - reserve tickets

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aki-sasamoto-squirrel-ways-tickets-554686982697

Saturday, May 20, 8:11pm (sunset) - reserve tickets

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aki-sasamoto-squirrel-ways-tickets-554689771037

Academy Tours
Free guided tours of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, followed by a visit to Aki Sasamoto’s installation Squirrel Ways, are offered throughout the spring - RSVP required

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/guided-tour-of-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-letters-tickets-551827850957

Wednesday, March 29, 10am
Friday, April 14, 4pm
Wednesday, April 19, 4pm
Wednesday, May 10, 10am

American Academy of Arts and Letters
633 West 155th Street
New York, NY 10032

A site specific performance, “Devotion” by artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander, featuring 12 dancers from Los Angeles Dance Project and an original score by the composer, Celia Hollander.

12 dancers perform on rooftops, balconies and fountains, creating a dynamic constellation that extends through the Neutra VDL House's architecture. The choreography is guided by Robert Frost’s poem, “Devotion" - the dancers’ bodies articulate each letter of the poem, physically reciting the words from beginning to end.

Saturday, February 18, 4-6pm

Costumes designed by Madeline Hollander and constructed by Rosalida Medina.

RSVP by emailing info@bortolamigallery.com

kaufmann repetto is pleased to present re-materialized: the stuff that matters, a group exhibition curated by astrid welter, spanning across both milan and new york galleries. this dual-presentation features the work of lisa alvarado, maja bajevic, jonathan baldock, leda catunda, christina forrer, jeffrey gibson, françoise grossen, yee i-lann, suzanne jackson, charlotte johannesson, luba krejčí, maria lai, barbara levittoux-świderska, rodney mcmillian, hana miletić, małgorzata mirga tas, rosita and angela missoni, dianna molzan, margherita raso, erin m. riley, lj roberts, and pae white. this project is in relation to an ongoing research program that kaufmann repetto has dedicated to the textile medium. to coincide with the current group show, the new york gallery will also feature a presentation of works by the late italian textile designer renata bonfanti, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in the united states.

throughout the past decade, textile-based artworks have found a new currency in the artworld. a proliferation of exhibitions dedicated to this long-overlooked medium has generated an intensification of critical theory, reviewing a variety of viewpoints: the role of feminal practitioners and their refusal of outdated, gendered expectations; the bias of craft versus fine art; the relation of textiles to cultural identity, socioeconomic codes, and societal coexistence, amongst countless others. many of these investigations are at the core of the practices of the artists featured in re-materialized: the stuff that matters, presenting a spectrum of textile-based vocabularies.

the specific, tactile sensuousness of textile work fulfills our desire for re-materialized experiences. now stuck somewhere between the physical and the virtual world, we are continuously witnessing the relentless digitalization of humanity, including sensory interactions. the more we realize the consequences of what is in fact dematerialization, the more urgency forms for resistance, together with the desire for a tangible, somatic connection to the world that surrounds us. if taken literally, we may begin to grasp the notion that nothing encompasses us more intimately through our bodily existence than cloth, one of the world’s most ancient cultural materials.

the title of the exhibition pays homage to lucy lippard and seth siegelaub, both pioneering curators and writers who in their early careers contributed to the definition and emergence of conceptual art. “re-materialization” takes a playful twist on lippard’s seminal text, “the dematerialization of art” (1968), an essay that has since become a cornerstone in art criticism and theory. “the stuff that matters” refers to siegelaub’s decades-long bibliographic research on textiles and their social and economic history in the world, which eventually led to the activities of his stichting egress foundation. despite their different trajectories, both scholars and their ideologies have been central to contemporary art discourse, defying “the sacrosanct ivory walls and heroic, patriarchal mythologies” (lippard, 1973). with the newly gained prevalence for textile art and the boundless examination of these handcrafted works as powerful carriers of a political and societal materiality, lippard’s and siegelaub’s legacy continues.

The Edith Farnsworth House Historic House is pleased to present the 2023 Artist in Residence exhibition, The Last of Animal Builders curated by Alberto Ortega Trejo and featuring the works of Faysal Altunbozar, Selva Aparicio, ASMA, Daniel Baird, Renée Green, Claudia Hart, Ragnar Kjartansson, Michael Rakowitz, Joshi Radin, and Thiago Rocha Pitta. 

The works in this show, selected from the Thoma Foundation’s collection and several Chicago-based artists, open a dialogue between the artists and our iconic Mies van der Rohe-designed home and surroundings. The show offers new perspectives and critiques on modern architecture, power relations in the built environment, and examines the construction of nature as an intellectual framework. Whether through video, drawing, or sculpture, the works in this exhibition engage animal, vegetal, and mineral metaphors as vehicles to suggest alternative interpretations of human becoming, social transformation, and material exchange. This show both enhances our current staging of the House and provides a fresh lens to view our space and history with a special nod to and commentary on Lord Palumbo’s former sculpture garden on the grounds.

We hope you’ll join us to open this incredible exhibition complete with engaging conversation and light refreshments!

In celebration of Lena Henke’s comic book, I Don't Love Berlin, Crazy City, Bortolami will be hosting a book launch in The Upstairs on December 8th from 6:30-8:30pm. The book launch will include a lecture by Henke detailing the research behind the publication.

At once a comic book, image atlas, photographic archive, and anti-guidebook to Berlin, I Don't Love Berlin, Crazy City, imagines the present and future of the the city's Hansaviertel district, taking seriously its postwar moniker as “the city of tomorrow” [“die Stadt von Morgen”].

For the past decade, Lena Henke has produced a body of work that explores her personal and bodily relation to the architecture and urban design of the cities she inhabits. Her new set of sculptures, which appear in the publication as animated comic book characters, excavate the local histories, kitchens and household artefacts of the Hansaviertel, while spewing wisdom on gender, technology, and urban space from an eclectic group of cultural references ranging from Max Frisch and Klaus Theweleit to Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado, Leslie Kern and others.

The publication was published on the occasion of the exhibition Lena Henke: Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen at Klosterfelde Edition in Berlin, April 30 - June 30, 2022

Distributed by Koenig books

The collection show Changes focuses on recent acquisitions to the mumok collection, with works by Leidy Churchman, János Fájo, Philipp Fleischmann, Birke Gorm, Jojo Gronostay, Frida Orupabo, and Emily Wardill, and other works from the collection that have not yet been shown at mumok, and confronts these with older holdings which can thus be seen afresh.

The exhibition title Changes refers to a work by Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), who recently passed away. He identified the key to his artistic practice in “a sense of the importance of process, of change, of the importance of difference itself, a freedom to take command and work from one’s own ideas.” The title of his work Change (1970), which is in the mumok collection, refers to the fact that Gilliam’s “drape paintings,” of which this work is an example, are hung without frames from the ceiling and can look very different depending on the nature of the space where they are shown.

For FRONT 2022, Cleveland-born artist Renée Green has conceived Contact, her first major exhibition in the city, which occupies all of moCa Cleveland’s public spaces and radiates out into the city with workshops and film screenings.

A contrapuntal exhibition, Contact weaves together Green’s own works–some newly commissioned by FRONT 2022­–with a vast array of invited participants with whom she’s been in conversation through the years.

Marina Rheingantz’s paintings and embroidery are nourished by the recollection of Brazilian landscapes, memories of the compactness of the earth, of light and its variations, of the atmospheric nebula of twilight, of the pointillist dissemination of birds in the sky, of the emergence in clusters of flowers and shrubs, of mounds emerged on the surface of the flooded plains… Painting landscapes, today, cannot be envisaged without the awareness of the incongruity and the inactuality of such subject. Painting landscapes cannot depart from the conviction that such a subject – historically exhausted – can still be tackled, especially if one keeps in mind a banality that it is always good to remember, namely that a painting is first of all the story of a look at something: the painting tells how the painter’s gaze landed on his subject before placing it on its support. What we see of Marina Rheingantz’s landscapes are not the landscapes themselves but a singular look at these expanses, the way she sees them with memory, in the leafing of plans and patterns, the aerial dives of expanses without horizon strewn with suspended patterns, agglomerates of light, dust, phosphenes, clouds of microscopic ephemera, spangled with particles of reality frozen in appearance and yet always moving. The gaze is brought to a halt, stopped in its surveying by the resistance of the paint, by the compactness of its surface, by the web of patterns and signs that dot the areas and are superimposed on them like openwork filters.

Texts by Douglas Fogle and Jean-Charles Vergne
French / English, format 30 x 24 cm, 216 pages

Publisher: FRAC Auvergne

Join artist Barbara Kasten, editor Stephanie Cristello (Curator), and author Humberto Moro (Dia Art Foundation) in advance of the book Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020) publishing in Fall of 2022 with Skira. Assembling a group of leading writers—including Irena Haiduk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Mimi Zeiger—the publication features newly commissioned texts that further the discourse into Kasten’s varied practice with a focus on work from the last five years alongside previously unpublished projects from the 1960s to the present.

The online space of this event, designed by Tal Erez and Dan Handel, will explore virtual interiors as well as interim videos inspired by Barbara Kasten’s visual worlds. Presented in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art’s program, Art Design Chicago Now, and Skira Editore.

Thu, May 26, 2022

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has opened a room on its fourth floor featuring 12 striped cotton fabric works by Daniel Buren

In 1965, Buren visited the Marché Saint-Pierre, a textile market in Paris, and purchased rolls of striped canvas reminiscent of awnings you might see outside a café. Taken by the stripes’ minimalism and neutrality, Buren began to use this canvas for his works, painting over the colored stripes at or near the left and right borders of the canvas in white acrylic. He felt that the simplicity of the stripes allows his works to relate to their physical surroundings—and in so doing, they call attention to the social and political dimensions of the contexts in which they’re displayed.

The works will remain on view at MoMA until autumn 2022.

Part of “A Cool Million”, a public arts initiative for climate awareness led by artists and institutions to expand environmental justice programming and support the conservation of one million acres of land.

The Dries Van Noten Little House welcomes its first two-person exhibition, Some People See Time by artists Polly Apfelbaum and Madeline Hollander. In the exhibition, open through September 11, 2021, the artists work in a dialogue one color, movement, texture, and tempo with Hollander’s choreographic drawings, made into a calendar of sorts, and Apfelbaum’s “fallen paintings” of fabric strewn about the floor, shifting every week of the exhibition.

In the exhibition text from Stephen Westfall, he writes, “The synesthete toggles across the border between anguish and reverie. Kandinsky would have to commit himself to bed for days at a time when overcome by synesthesia-induced headaches, but he also envisioned abstract painting when immersed in a yellow cloud during a performance of his friend, Schoenberg’s music. The otherwise uncommunicative, seemingly catatonic subjects of Oliver Sacks’ essay ‘The Twins’ would call out impossibly large prime numbers to each other and rock back and forth in subdued ecstasy, a story which brings me to numbers as vessels of color and flavor. Madeline Hollander and I disagree vehemently over the taste and color of the numeral ‘5,’ for instance, but we both see its aura and taste it.”

White Columns is happy to announce ‘From The Archives: White Columns & 112 Greene Street / 112 Workshop, 1970 – 2021…’ an exhibition that considers the ongoing legacy of New York’s oldest non-profit, alternative art space. Drawn exclusively from the organization‘s archives the exhibition charts the history of White Columns over the past five decades: from its beginnings at 112 Greene Street in SoHo to its current home in the Meatpacking District. White Columns was founded by a group of artists in October 1970 and was originally known as 112 Greene Street / 112 Workshop. The organization was renamed White Columns in 1980 following its move to 325 Spring Street.

The exhibition is structured around a display of archival materials – inc. press releases, posters, flyers, correspondence, mission statements, exhibition schedules, installation images, etc. – that runs through the gallery in the form of a timeline. Three large vitrines contain a selection of printed exhibition announcements from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. (The gallery largely stopped producing printed invitations c. 2008.) A further series of smaller vitrines focus on some twenty key projects from the organization’s fifty-year history – including those dedicated to exhibitions by Gordon Matta-Clark (1972), Louise Bourgeois (1974), Lee Quiñones and Fred Bathwaite (1980), Group Material (1987), Cady Noland (1988), and Fred Wilson (1990) among others.

Over the past fifty years – literally – thousands of artists have contributed to and helped to shape 112 Greene Street’s and White Columns’ programs. The exhibition, given the constraints of space, can only be a partial account of all this extraordinary activity. The gallery’s full archives can now be accessed online via our website at www.whitecolumns.org/archive/ (http://www.whitecolumns.org/archive/) – a resource that is constantly being updated and augmented as new archival materials come to light.

Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events, her work engages with explorations into cir­cuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented.

At Borås Art Museum, Green presents Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words) (2020), which is composed of twenty-eight double sided banners hanging from the gallery ceiling. Invoking the words of American Swedish poet May Swenson, the work invites viewers into a textual and spatial dialogue with words, color, and form. Space Poem #7 continues Green’s ongoing investigation into transmutation and meaning and its formal and poetical modes of communication.

First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Anna Kavan and Cortázar; she watches Fellini; she dreams about the Mediterranean Sea. Much like Green’s multimedia installations encompassing the sonic, spatial, and visual, Camino Road is richly layered—part intellectual genealogy, part fictional personal memory, and part cultural criticism.

Green has described the book as a “self-conscious homage to or parody of the ‘road novel,’ ‘bohemia,’ and artist-rebels.” “I’d been thinking about the beat generation, figures like Jack Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.—the mythic construction of the artist personality as rebel and how females, and myself in particular, entered into that,” she said. “These ‘beat’ sources seemed to form a typical American introduction to the idea of bohemia and of being an artist.”

Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the group exhibition “Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the text is written in both English and Spanish, and accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s. The book was published through Green’s production company, Free Agent Media (FAM), which since 1994 has been circulating and exhibiting media, printed matter, and time-based projects.

A unique treatise on the circuits of exchange in gender, politics, and art, Camino Road can also be read as a variation on the classic Bildungsroman genre. “I don’t feel developed in any area,” thinks Lyn at one point. “It’s very difficult being young and incomplete.” Importantly, she also muses, “I want to be swallowed by another language.”